redisburning wrote: it's impossible to find idlers for a decent price these days; either they are preposterously expensive or you get super lucky and pay 15 dollars for one.

Very true! Just few years ago guys were chasing widows who didn't know what to do with their hubby's vinyl, velves and old hi-fi gear, and eventually gave it all away to 'a good home' but these times are almost over.

acoll123 wrote:
I was surprised when I showed up to shoot a wrestling match (my first one) and they turned out all of the lights in the gym except for an overhead spot. Luckily I had the 50 L in the bag . . .

These are great photos! Nice to see that there is a good reason to shoot a lens this fast wide open!

I've heard that it is very hard to manually focus fast lenses on digital cameras, is it possible to use the stop down button on the camera and focus at the taking aperture. You could always open it up all the way after focusing.

DaveOls wrote:
I've heard that it is very hard to manually focus fast lenses on digital cameras, is it possible to use the stop down button on the camera and focus at the taking aperture. You could always open it up all the way after focusing.

The focusing screens of DSLRs (on Nikons at least) are optimized to about f/2.5. You therefore can't properly gauge the actual depth of field at wider apertures nor confidently rely upon focus assist dot confirmation or dead reckoning for the precise focal point. Using non-native lenses on adapters necessitates stopping down for metering but is preferential when focusing to compensate for focus shift.

If its a native mount, releasing the preview button after focusing invariably results in motion and unless your on a solid tripod, you've moved it enough to lose the desired focus.

DaveOls wrote:
I've heard that it is very hard to manually focus fast lenses on digital cameras, is it possible to use the stop down button on the camera and focus at the taking aperture. You could always open it up all the way after focusing.

with super fast lenses it's much better to focus at shooting aperture because most of them have some focus shift. also, at f/1.2 or similar dof is extremely narrow, if you focus stopped down than open up the lens you will have a much narrower dof than you did when you focused. in my experience focusing fast lenses on dslrs is only really a problem with nikon cameras because nikon doesn't offer precision matte focus screens while canon and sony do. these are screens optimized for focusing fast lenses while the stock screens that come with modern dslrs are optimized for brightness when using slow zooms. magnified liveview is definitely the easiest way to focus superfast lenses btw.